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I am running Wordpress on a dedicated server with a MySQL backend. I have a query that usually takes <1 second to execute, but periodically, this query will get stuck in a 'copying to tmp table' state and stay that way indefinitely until it is either killed or until mysqld is restarted. After restarting mysqld the problem goes away, the (identical) query once again takes <1 second to execute. This leads me to believe this is a configuration problem.

How do I go about solving this problem? The query itself is not too intensive, and my server is not experiencing any sudden traffic spikes. The tables themselves are all InnoDB format.